Burning Bright
by champagne-and-razor-blades
Summary: Beckett had somehow managed to agree to move in with him. Him being Castle. Castle being Rick. She was going to live in his house. Sequel to "Up in Flames".
1. Kindling

This was just going to be a short epilogue to "Up in Flames" but it ended up as a sequel. If you haven't read my story "Up in Flames", that would be a good idea :) thank you so much to everyone who is still reading this!

* * *

Beckett tried not to feel useless as Lanie helped her to slide the soft blue shirt over her head. Her friend didn't seem at all bothered by it - in fact, she had insisted on not leaving her to struggle into the shirt on her own - but Beckett still really, really didn't like having to rely on other people this much. She could get herself dressed mostly on her own; pants were fine, as were bras as long as they hooked in the front, but she still had an immense amount of difficulty lifting her arms up. The second her elbows got to shoulder height, pain would blaze across her side, sometimes so sharp that she had to grit her teeth to stop a yelp from escaping.

She turned to the mirror in her bathroom, pivoting to look at one side of herself and then the other as if on autopilot. As Castle had pointed out while he was visiting her the previous day, she looked less like a ghost than she had in the days after she'd woken up, and even though she could still see the stress in the sharper jut of her cheekbones and the way her hair had lost some of its shine, Kate decided she looked almost normal now without the harsh hospital lights.

Castle had, as promised, visited her once a day since he'd been discharged; sometimes twice if he felt she needed it. Their conversations had been light-hearted, the topic of conversation carefully steered away from anything too serious. She'd been grateful for that. However, there was that one thing she'd agreed to, in a sudden, overwhelming rush of relief that he was alive...

"You look fine, Kate," Lanie said softly, tapping her finger against the handle of Beckett's suitcase. "And Castle will think you look even better than okay."

Ah. Yes. That. She'd somehow manage to agree to move in with him. Him being Castle. Castle being Rick. She was going to _live in his house. _God, it was such an awful idea, but at the time, agreeing had seemed like the right option. She decided to blame the hospital drugs. Castle probably hadn't expected her to say yes when he'd offered - or maybe he had, she didn't know. Either way, she hadn't expected _herself _to say yes.

Kate Beckett did not say yes to Richard Castle. She said, "No!" or "In your dreams," or "If you ask me _one more time_, I am going to shoot you." Anything but yes._ She did not say yes._

But she had.

So that settled it, really. She'd been discharged from hospital that morning; gone home with the help of Lanie, showered, packed a suitcase, and slipped into yoga pants that, contrary to Lanie's belief, she had **not **picked out because they made her ass look great.

"You read-y?" the M.E asked with a wiggle of her eyebrows.

"Could you not be suggestive?"

"Honey, you're moving in with a man who's wanted you for years - and don't you even try to deny that you want him right back. I am fully within my rights to be suggestive."

"I'm living there _temporarily_, because it's _convenient_!"

"Convenient for what… having sex with him?!"

Beckett shot her friend a look.

She received one right back.

* * *

Castle's cab pulled up outside the hospital; he thanked the driver and swung his legs out of the door. The hospital stretched above him, the sight of it entirely too familiar after the past weeks of visiting Kate.

His mother and Alexis had actually suggested doing what he was going to – in fact, both of them had offered to do it themselves – but he thought it was more appropriate for him to, seeing as he'd been the injured one. Still was the injured one. He looked down at his crutches, clicking along the ground. They really weren't that bad; he'd gotten used to them fairly quickly, and could move along at a speed that his daughter deemed as a hazard for public safety.

He was going to get _awesome _biceps out of this.

The route he took was one that he knew off by heart, just walk past the café by the entrance, hang a left, and then take the elevator up to the third floor (humming awkwardly under his breath as he waiting for the doors to slide open).

She could be anywhere, really – chatting to a patient, fixing someone's flowers, changing bandages – but today, he spotted her wheeling a trolley covered in plates of food down the corridor. Eliza.

"Mr. Castle?" she queried, kicking the stuck wheel of the trolley so it would turn into the room nearest to her, "Is there anything I can do for ya?"

"Actually, no, I just wanted a quick word."

"I'll be right with you."

He waited as she ducked into the ward, no doubt singing under her breath. Some of the people in this hospital might be great, he thought, but after this last visit, he didn't want to come back here for a long, long time. The endless white walls and the smell of chemicals made his palms sweat and his heart rate quicken without his permission.

"Yeah?" Eliza said, breaking his train of thought as she emerged from the ward.

"I just wanted to give you these," Castle said, leaning on one crutch to pull a bunch of flowers out of the bag hanging around his other wrist. They were freesias, purple freesias with little golden star-shaped hearts. "And say thank you."

She beamed, taking the flowers from him and pressing her nose to them, breathing them in.

"Sir, I was only doing my job."

"No, you were doing above and beyond your job. You took care of Beckett when you didn't need to, and you let me go in to see her, even though you weren't really allowed to."

Eliza flushed, her eyes staring into the distance as if she was trying to think of the right thing to say. Finally, she spoke.

"Five years ago, I had a… a friend, I suppose, although he was so much more than that. He was a cop, too. Not like your detective; he worked in narcotics. We were pretty close. I knew he'd had feeling for me for a while, but I didn't think a relationship was really what I wanted, you know? I was still studying then. I wanted to focus on that."

Castle had noticed the past tense of "I had a friend". His stomach sank.

"It got to the point when I was considering telling him how I felt, still didn't want a relationship but we were kind of in one as it was. I'd been working up the guts to say it, to just tell him… the day that I was going to tell him, he was on a drug raid. Undercover. His cover got blown, and they shot him, once in the chest and again in the head. No way could any person survive that, they told me. No way."

She wasn't crying as she spoke, although in her position, Castle thought he would have been.

"I still don't know if he knew I loved him."

"He knew," he said quietly, meeting her eyes. "If you loved him, then he knew."

Eliza said nothing for a few seconds, running her thumb over the stem of the flowers. Castle had thought there was something more to her, but he would never have guessed this. She'd reacted to a turning point in her life the way Beckett had, except instead of fighting crime because her mom was murdered, Eliza fought to fix people who were close to death, so that the people who knew them wouldn't have to feel the way she had. The way she did.

"Invite me to your wedding, hey?" she asked after a moment.

"Of course."

"Should probably be on my way, Mr. Castle. Thank you for the flowers, and… thank you."

He nodded, turning to crutch his way back down the corridor. Beckett would be at his house soon; he wanted to be there to greet her instead of subjecting her to his mother's innuendo laden comments about their relationship.


	2. Flint

Thanks for reviews, guys :) quick question for everyone: I haven't watched Tick, Tick, Tick or Boom in ages, and I can't remember where in Castle's loft Kate stayed? Does anyone know where, and also where that is in relation to Castle's bedroom? (Of course the distance between their rooms is completely irrelevant ;) )

* * *

Richard Castle had no idea what to do with himself.

He'd tried everything he could think of. He'd flicked through the channels on the television, the image on the screen flashing from Kim Kardashian's face to a zoomed-out shot of a football field to an indignant Mitt Romney, before he gave up and shoved the remote away. He had cleaned most visible surfaces with an out-of-character meticulousness.

He'd toyed with the Angry Birds app on his phone for a few minutes, but ended up just shooting the tiny black birds into the sky and letting them explode into bundles of feathers, one by one.

Nothing had stopped the sweat from prickling on his palms, and if anything, the unsteady tripping of his heartbeat had only increased.

So, here he was, _pacing _back and forth through his kitchen like- like some sort of caged animal waiting to be fed. Probably not the most appropriate simile for this particular situation, but Castle swore he could feel his brain cells sizzling into oblivion. Sure, she'd stayed with him before. Some kind of ridiculous coincidence; that she could nearly get herself blown up only to live with him for the foreseeable future _twice. _

This time was different. They had—grown in their relationship since then. He wasn't going to jump to any conclusions, but he thought maybe there was something more between them than there had been a year ago. More attraction, maybe, but with less of that self control she exercised so religiously. And, the more obvious factor: she was **hurt, **broken ribs and bandages – and he was hurt, too, he thought wryly, wiggling his fingers around the handle of his crutch.

It had been a novelty at first, the purple cast and the crutches which let him swing his legs around, but the glory of that had lasted about ten minutes, until he realised that a) he had the upper body strength of a paraplegic tyrannosaurus rex, and b) stairs were a thing that existed. The former, he had sort of conquered, as his muscles got used to the extra strain put on them, although his biceps still ached a bit when he woke up in the mornings. The latter, however, was a whole different story.

He had googled "how to walk up stairs with crutches", only to find out that, apparently, "going up stairs with crutches requires both strength and flexibility." He was strong enough, sure. But _maybe _he'd been putting off going to the gym quite a lot more than he should have, and, okay, his muscles weren't quite what they'd been two years ago. And flexibility… forty-two year old writers weren't meant to be flexible. And he certainly lived up to that.

Castle winced slightly at the memory of the awkward sideways crab-shuffle he'd been reduced to doing every single time he needed to go upstairs. Alexis had actually _snorted _the first time she'd witnessed it. Maybe he'd just have to wait until Beckett was elsewhere to go upstairs, because he didn't want to totally surrender his dignity by letting her see him do that. Yeah, he'd have to make a quickish dash upstairs whenever she was asleep or in the shower or—

In the shower. Kate Beckett, in the shower. In his shower. Naked.

He wasn't sure whether to stop the flood of thoughts or not. She was sexy as hell any time, but thinking of her like that when she had broken ribs and cuts from shards of shattered glass- it felt wrong. Not repulsive, just like he should have her permission first, to think of her like this when she was halfway to broken. Making sly jokes about the hotness of her body would make him feel a bit off, when the perfect curve of her hips were mirrored by half-moon wounds on her knees where she'd landed too hard on the concrete, when there were bandaged grazes on the palm of her hands.

No, he wouldn't push it, wouldn't push this, he told himself after a moment's thought. She needed to heal. Maybe he did, too, and not just in the physical sense.

So he'd take care of her. He'd look after her, and he'd count himself lucky if he got to listen to the pulsing thud of her heartbeat beneath those fractured ribs.

That was that.

* * *

That was _not _that at all, Castle decided a few minutes later, as he hovered awkwardly by the table in his living room. Maybe he shouldn't have invited her to stay with him at all, maybe he should have just asked her on a date once they were better or something, because she'd be able to stay with her dad or with Lanie, instead of…

Instead of what?

Awkward silences over breakfast, moments where he ended up a bit closer to her than he'd planned and her eyes strayed to his mouth, bickering over things that didn't really matter—

Now that he thought of it like that, he could only pray they didn't end up killing each other.

Castle tried to lean against the edge of his table without thinking, and he winced at the sharp clack of his the handle of his crutch banging against the edge. Well, great, he was more uncoordinated than he'd been in his life (and that included his years as a gangly teenager with disproportionately large feet) and the most beautiful woman he'd ever met was going to be at his loft in a matter of minutes.

And just as that train of thought was settling in his mind, there was a knock on the door.


End file.
